A Newsweek reporter who was held for 118 days in an Iranian prisontalked about how his interrogator was obsessed with New Jersey.

The interrogator -- a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- believes New Jersey is "paradise on earth,'' the prototypical American state where people drink all the time, have sex all the time and never run into Jews.

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The interrogator -- a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps -- believes New Jersey is "paradise on earth,'' the prototypical American state where people drink all the time, have sex all the time and never run into Jews.

North Jersey is not like South Jersey. Northwestern New Jersey is quite pretty as are the pine barrens in the south. The rest needs help. Yes it may be pricey but then there are $750,000 houses on tiny lots, with 2 bedrooms, and less than 20 ft from a six lane highway with no walls or fences. Northeastern Jersey is very, very crowded and many (though certainly not all) residents lack what others might consider to be good taste.

As for thinking there are no Jews there, WTF?? Where on earth did he get that idea?

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If you read Bahari's Newsweek article on his captivity, you will learn that his interrogator, and probably the entire organization for which he works (the intelligence branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard), believe that Newsweek is a spy agency and that a guy who interviewed Bahari for a segment of The Daily Show was a spy because he dressed up "like some character out of a B movie about mercenaries in the Middle East&#8212;with a checkered Palestinian kaffiyeh around his neck and dark sunglasses." The segment from The Daily Show was part of their "evidence" that Bahari was a spy. Yes, they are that fucking ignorant and obtuse. Common effects of paranoia.

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It's not necessarily lack of sex (lack of alcohol, maybe); it's lack of sexual freedom, which of course generates extravagant, envious fantasies about the sex lives of those who do not live under similar constraint. Bahari writes of his interrogator (to whom he refers as "Mr. Rosewater" because of the scent he wore):

Early on, Mr. Rosewater had demanded my e-mail and Facebook passwords, so he had a very long list of contacts to grill me about, one by one. What did I know about this journalist's links to foreign organizations or governments? What was that one's take on events in Iran? And, if they were women, had I had sex with them? This last subject occupied Mr. Rosewater for several weeks. He was a young man, perhaps in his mid-30s. Sometimes, I think, he used sex as a way to humiliate me. But he also seemed genuinely curious about someone who had spent so much time in the West. Once he asked me how I knew one lady friend:

"We met at a party," I said.

"A sex party?"

I was taken aback. "I don't know what a sex party is," I said hesitantly. "I've never been to one."

"Yeah, right," he said sarcastically. He was convinced that any party where women went unveiled had to be depraved. His professors, he said, had taught him about free love in the West. "You can't tell me that you can't just take any woman's hand in the Champs-Élysées and have sex with her." He drew out the syllables in "Champs-Élysées," the way he had with "New Jersey."